A wide variety of surveillance and imaging technologies depend upon techniques that fuse data from multiple sensors. Using these techniques, pieces of information from various sources can be combined into a single image containing the important information from all sensors. For instance, infrared imagery can be combined with visible imagery to create an improved image.
One basic data fusion technique is “Pan Sharpening” wherein a panchromatic image with a fine spatial resolution or low ground sample distance (GSD) is combined with a second image having a larger GSD. An example of a system implementing such technique is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,949,914 to Yuen.
Systems using “Pan sharpening” techniques employ a single band (gray scale) panchromatic image and multi-band spectral image (i.e. a color image). However, these “Pan sharpening” techniques generally are known to introduce artifacts from the sharpening image into the sharpened result.
Other methods and systems currently utilized in the industry for processing images by way of sharpening one image with another image have also exhibited a side effect of introducing artifacts from the sharpening process. In turn, these artifacts lead to users or viewers of the sharpened image confusing the artifact as actual data from the original image.
Hence, there exists a need in the industry to overcome these problems and provide a method and system for enhancing the sharpness of images without introducing unwanted artifacts into the enhanced image. Accordingly, there exists a need to concurrently display information from both a low-resolution image and a high-resolution image without modifying any pixel values in the image to be enhanced. There also exists a need to leave the original image to be enhanced intact, preserving the original data without modification, while overlaying enhancing data from a second image so to preserve the original image while displaying the enhancing data as an overlay to provide enhanced context.